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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29712072">Humanity For Beginners</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettyraven/pseuds/prettyraven'>prettyraven</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who (2005)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Episode: s04e06 The Doctor's Daughter, Family, Family Musings, Gen, Soldiers, Study in Humanity, Temporary Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 17:54:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,208</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29712072</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettyraven/pseuds/prettyraven</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jenny comes to life in a chamber with notions of what it means to be a soldier first and human second.</p><p>These notions shift over the course of her life, death and life again.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>The Doctor &amp; Jenny (Doctor Who: The Doctor's Daughter)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Humanity For Beginners</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She comes to in a machine.</p><p>Bones solidify, sinews and muscles knitting themselves together. All that she ever needed to know from life is already there; war strategy and history and tactic, body prepared for prime physical fitness –</p><p>all in the name of dying.</p><p><em>Soldier</em>. She knows this is what she is before she ever thinks of having an identity, and she likes the word. In her mouth, it feels solid. Dependable, purposeful. She can leave this chamber and already has the meaning people spend their lives chasing.</p><p>Her father is on the other side of the door. She wants to meet him. Lets her body fall into pose, and opens the door. Parent and progeny look nothing alike, but that’s alright. There’s another man offering her a gun, and she takes it naturally. Tucks it against her body, beams at her father.</p><p>“Hello dad.”</p><p>```</p><p>She is not the child her father ever wanted, in so many ways. She was literally born to wield a weapon that he hates, and he never intended to produce progeny regardless. So she quarrels with him – <em>she is his</em> – and he seems to see right through her, keen gaze slipping over her. He was disappointed from the moment she took the weapon.</p><p>Children disappoint their parents sometimes.</p><p>That’s alright. She wasn’t made to be a family.</p><p>She has a job to do.</p><p>```</p><p>She regards her father’s companions. They both have names. People have names, she knows, it’s how they know where they come from and where they belong, who they are. Parents name their children.</p><p>Donna spends time thinking of a name for her; she can almost see the woman’s thought process. In the end, she settles on Jenny – not <em>for</em> someone, she clarifies, but as a nickname of her circumstance of birth. Generated Anomaly.</p><p>```</p><p>Jenny thinks about parenthood and looks at her solitary parent. She should, it seems, have a second parent. Her gazes flick over Donna and Martha, and she lets herself imagine briefly: surviving a battle, her father letting her come with them, calling the older women <em>aunt</em>.</p><p>Imagines family.</p><p>```</p><p>She feels no connection to ancestry, ancient or new. On a planet solar systems away from her father’s own origins, and away from his companions’ origins, she belongs nowhere.</p><p>```</p><p>They nearly fall prey to a trap. Laser beams with the power to disintegrate them stand in the way. She impresses her father, this time she sees it clear on his face, with her quick thinking and easy gymnastics. <em>I was born for this</em>, she wants to say. It’s on the tip of her tongue, but she bites it back.</p><p>No need to remind them of her unusual origin – not now, when she’s just beginning to break the ice.</p><p>```</p><p>Donna and her father listen to her chest with a stethoscope. Twin hearts thudding in sync.</p><p>Like father, like daughter, Donna surmises. It’s still not enough for her to be the child he would want. In this cell, she has no-one but two women accepting her as his. The man whose genes made her barely wants to know.</p><p>```</p><p>They run. They think.</p><p>They solve the riddle of the numerical codes everywhere. They try to stay alive with quick wit and agile bodies.</p><p><em>This</em>, then, is human, Jenny thinks. Running and gasping for air, drawing in quick breaths, trying to make as little noise as possible. The running and thinking are her human life then, the soldier who was made to simply <em>fight</em> and never think.</p><p>She likes the thinking because it’s new; she likes the running because it pushes her already-primed body to its limit.</p><p>(she doesn’t let herself think that she inherited <em>that</em> particular trait from her parent)</p><p>```</p><p>When Jenny is <strike>twenty years old</strike> <strike>four hours old</strike> death comes to her.</p><p>As young as she is, death is something she knows. Four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine generations precede her; death makes them all the same in the end. She has generations' worth of wisdom about burying your dead, about standing up from feeling someone's lack of pulse and still going on fighting, about being the last one of your generation still standing.</p><p>The only thing she doesn't know about death is how it feels.</p><p>The bullet punctures her chest; snags on her heart. She’s fading fast, and her father implores her to live: they have so much to see, so much more to do than they ever could see or do. He’s holding her as she fades, sobbing for breath, and she relaxes into her first – only – parental embrace.</p><p>She dies.</p><p>She feels wanted now, wanted by her reluctant parent who could show her the multiverse. All it took was dying.</p><p>(there isn’t air in her lungs nor the psychology in her head to acknowledge that he wants her around when it’s the end of her life, when she’s done all she was meant to do, when she’s no longer going to be around for it to be an option)</p><p>```</p><p>She was dead.</p><p>The Hath and the humans must have been preparing funeral rites, or maybe she was simply going to be buried, or they were going to continue their battle.</p><p>Whichever way it happens, she wakes to a dull room and the surprise of the men present.</p><p><em>Is this the afterlife? Are we all dead?</em> Jenny rifles through her head for any idea or knowledge and turns up nothing. All she was programmed to know was war and history and strategy; she wasn’t built to know philosophy. Her religion started and ended on a battlefield.</p><p>She has no idea if humans are supposed to experience this after death, but basic logic suggests <em>not</em>. What she knows is this: one of her hearts stopped, and then she lost consciousness. The men are telling her what she can do, can’t do, should and shouldn’t do. She looks around, sits up properly, registers in passing the gold particles issuing from her mouth and nose as she breathes.</p><p>They look at her like she is meant to fall back in line, maybe they want a super-soldier who can’t die. Maybe they want a specimen for a new line of soldiers all unfolding from a sample of the tissue in her hand. Instead, she hops down from her pyre and dusts herself off. Smiles brightly at them and instinctively runs a finger over her wrist. There’s a pulse. She’s alive.</p><p>Even without a concept of afterlife, this seems simple enough; she is alive.</p><p>She doesn’t know how, but she’ll take it.</p><p>```</p><p>There’s a rocket just standing by, and so much <em>life</em> left to live. So much out there that she can’t even fathom.</p><p>More to all of it than just bloodshed.</p><p>She slips into the rocket, offers up a brief explanation over the intercom, and prepares for flight. They can’t stop her; the only other person of her kind has already departed in his TARDIS, and anyway – what are they going to do? Send her to bed without dinner?</p><p>There’s too much to live for; she wants to get started now.</p><p>(as human as she isn’t, she has maybe the most human of things: the will to hold onto life)</p><p>Her father and aunts are gone. She’ll catch up with them some day.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>If you'd like to leave constructive criticism that would be much welcomed and appreciated!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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